LEADERSHIP BY FIAT

For years and years during the corporate life, it was a common topic in the coaching classes to define leadership. Many of the positions that I held I had somebody over me I was reporting to until I founded my own companies. If indeed performance is the key question here, then it was important to assess of the leadership of the company or the group was effective. Was I effective as a leader to lead and grow my company? For a long time, I thought I knew exactly when leadership was about, but it was still very hazy to articulate it. Something that happened last week made it clear in my mind with leadership what it was all about and this is the story you will read below erecting a flagpole on top of a mountain just behind my fishing village of Kalkan just the day before 29 October the Republic day of Turkey.

This is the mountaintop right behind Kalkan. It is called the bayraktepe, flag hill, a bare rocky protrusion out of the calcium rich geology of southern Turkey. Its faces are rugged, sharp, and scissor like a result of heavy duty erosion, yet there are many crevices which make it amenable to climb for an old fart like me.

This is the Turkish flag we spread over the bayraktepe peak on the ground we prepared, which also shows the village of Kalkan below. The route to bayraktepe is first with car to the village of Bezirgan and then by foot maybe a few kilometers across a terrain heavily wooded and uneven with typical Mediterranean scrub land vegetation called maquis which comprises shrubs with razor thin leaves and sharp edges and thorns galore because it was the end of the season and it has also been parched this year.

The pole was some 10 meters long and was custom fitted to enable the flag to sway and rotate and not wrap around the pole. Initial estimates was that it was some 150 kgs. But after a few attempts to lift it and carry it, the number than doubled to 300kg. After all it was an electric pole converted into a flagpole and it was cheap so that the volunteer organization called AKUT SEARCH AND RESCUE ORGANIZATION here in Kalkan could afford it.

We started the journey around 7.30 in the morning, a few of the dedicated AKUT members, including our local village doctor and his nurse wife, an AKUT leader, 4 other young guys, a Syrian immigrant worker, Katya and I. Clearly they did not have enough people although they had called some 20 volunteers, none responded positively to the endeavor. The Dodge truck which carried the steel pole tightly bound on its back and the roof from the shop to the base camp is custom made by a local Patara beach guy, named Mehmet who later distinguished himself to be the real leader whose steadfast and doggedly attitude saved the day. About him later, but the genuine drama as the preface to his brilliant debut was how we failed to carry the pole across the terrain and maqui, not over 30 meters, was all we could handle. Maneuvering the thing was very difficult and awkward on the rough terrain, and shrubbery was tall and prickly. Typical of many of the project failures, the common cause was again the understaffing and under-communicating. Under communicating because what they said to the Syrian workers was that the job was construction cleanup not to carry a 10 meter pole across rough terrain. Some workers showed up later with flip-flops. Of course, right in the middle of the job, they started complaining and left. Mohammed, who was in front of me climbing up the peak, said that he was afraid of the heights because he had fallen off a scaffolding a few years ago and he was quitting. He started coming down and left the portable generator right on the ledge for me to carry. This under communicating resulted in understaffing as the people left. The team reached the peak without the pole. We were all disappointed, but I think organizers were more disappointed and maybe, to a large extent, embarrassed for not being able to plan and organize the task at hand better. For the next few hours, we all launched into trying to rally more troops to make the treacherous journey to bayraktepe and join our forces to carry the pole on foot. My long-time friend Yalcin, who had been living in a nearby village for some 20 years, even recommended that with his good rapport with the local officials and reputation in the community he might be able to even get a helicopter to carry the pole. This was a typical thinking outside of the box kind of approach, which we entertained earnestly because we were desperate and heartbroken as the day was passing by. After a few phone calls, this idea fizzled out as well. Yes, indeed there was a helicopter parked in Kas, some 25 kilometers away, but the Russian or Ukrainian pilots whom were hired by the forestry department on a standby to extinguish the fires in the region had completed their contractual flying hours and now they are now charging some thousands of dollars per hour to fly.

We, all gathered up at the peak, bored and defeated initially, later perked up a bit after ferociously downing sucuk-ekmek, half of a loaf of bread stuffed with spicy sausage, roasted whole yellow onions with tomatoes and chili peppers. While eating, I heard the Dodge truck owner talking on the phone in English. Later, I found out he was talking to his foreign-born wife and giving her the directions to come to bayraktepe. This is a guy whom I thought I saw last year when we were hiking and lost the way on the way to Patara from Kalkan in the back roads. He was, later I called him the Robinson Crusoe of Patara, was this soft-spoken rather chubby guy with a long Buddhist kind of beard with expensive outdoor clothing. I asked him casually “You are giving instructions to some outside help in English?” ?

“No”, he said “I am talking to my wife”… and we started talking.

He lives in Patara and has two sons from his foreign wife and runs a camp and rents out his villas during the high season. He is well known in the area and with his capable, Soviet style high bar truck, he is ready and willing to help people and organizations with some special projects. Clearly he was bothered with the fact it was the late afternoon, the day before the Republic Day, the 4th of July of Turkey, the flagpole was some 2 kms away across from the rough terrain and thick bush. All the attempts to get some help, be it more muscle or some mechanical thing like a helicopter, were slowly turning sour. He said, “I have a bad knee. That’s why I could not go in the morning.”

Then, he got up and said, “Guys, we gotta do this” and called out the team. It was unexpected. How many are we? Who is waiting by the car??How many near the yayla, who can we call? What about the forestry guys? Are they coming? Did all the Syrians go back? “Shoote.”

Clearly, the objective at hand was known to everybody. He did not have to elaborate. Clearly what we had actually entered our heads was to erect and install the pole on bayraktepe so the people of Kalkan would see the flag proudly flying on the morning of the 29th of October, Cumhuriyet Bayrami. What he was doing was to collect as much of the information as possible, explore what the bottlenecks are and look for solutions and figure out which is the right thing to do, preceding a critical decision: either to call it off for the day and declare defeat or call the damn thing, erect and fly the flag. It was a bold move considering the fact that he chose not to partake in the effort in the morning, but now maybe out of desperation, he chose to tackle the problem. Many times, leadership introduces the aim, articulate, embellish, and communicate effectively but for some reasons, mostly stemming from narcissistic attitudes, do not follow through. However, this guy is a humble camp operator with a laser focus on getting the job done emphasize the importance of the efficiency and productivity so that the effort produced the desired result.

After the chosen team left the peak, those of us left behind, we cleaned up the camp area, burned some of the trash, and started heading back to the parking area. Coming down from the peak turned out to be a lot more treacherous than climbing up, the task made harder because of the increased load on my back. The hike took about one hour during which I befriended our local village doctor whom I had only seen him a few times only to go over my blood analysis results. I found out that he is from the Antalya area, and he also went to the same elementary school as I did yet some 20 years earlier. Alas, we ran into the group carrying the pole with Mehmet heading the pack with the stem of the pole, the heaviest part, on his shoulder directing the team, which now included a few forest department workers trailing with vigor and muscle. They were about to make a maneuver which would considerably reduce the tremendous effort by dropping, rather sliding the pole over the maqui over a slight cliff. There were nine people carrying the pole and including the six of us, many were offering opinions about what to do, a few were debating back and forth. At the end making the quality decision came from the leader of the pack as he was articulating in such a tone that he wasn’t putting down the ideas but actually motivating and bringing out the best in the offers. The solution was almost becoming an amalgamation of different ideas but being wrapped into a bundle that is manageable to be handled. I asked him about his knee? The question reminded somebody in the back of the pole to tie a few bandannas together and offered him to wrap around his ailing knee. He had completely forgotten about his knee and refused to wrap the make shift bandage again displaying a key leadership trait which is completely immersed in the goal and becoming a role model. He remained confident and composed about the decision to slide the pole over the shrubbery but slowly guide it through, preventing it to fall in the trough between the branches.

Pole was slid down the slope resting on the bushes waiting for the team headed by Mehmet to climb down from the higher ground, everybody happy with the results and convinced that the rest of the journey will be much easier and the goal of erecting?the pole on bayraktepe is now more than achievable than ever before. We left them in good spirits.?We also buoyed with joy and satisfaction headed back to our cars.

A few of the leadership traits I outlined from the observation of Mehmet that day clearly depicted what should be in the leaders today in the corporate world. During my tenure in both Silicon Valley companies, a total of 2, my leadership at the helm of the companies I founded, and in my last job as the CEO at a big holding company in Turkey, I came across many section heads, directors, executive directors, presidents and owners which were in those positions not because they displayed these traits but because they were tolerated. They did not even come close to any of these demonstrable values, yet they were there barking, yelling, screaming, throwing tantrum, condescending, and ridiculing instead of leading. At the time, I, along with so many we did not know how bad they were and yet they still are.?Now that you now know what you need to know, show them the way because those who now wield the power are there because they are surrounded by the people who protect them, and give accolades to how wonderful, and gorgeous they are and what they have accomplished. Somehow fueled by this encouragement they consider it to be okay to bark or show their prowess even graphically and dramatically in conference rooms, because they have to satisfy their ego, which is lacking in virility and class. Salaklik etme, don’t look the other way.